Exercise Helps Overweight Children Think
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When overweight and sedentary kids start to exercise regularly, their skills in thinking and planning improve, suggests a new study.
Brain Activity
Georgia Health Sciences University researchers had 171 overweight 7- to 11-year-olds either on a daily 20 or 40 minute exercise schedule or doing no exercise at all. Via Magnetic Resonance Imaging it was then examined how this influenced brain activity. To round it off, an intelligence test given at the beginning and at the end of the study looked at if the children’s scores differed due to exercising.
For those children exercising, the results showed increased brain activity in the areas where complex thinking, reasoning, abstract thinking and decision-making reside. On the intelligence test, the score for those that exercised for 40 minutes per day increased by an average of 3.8 points, while 20 minutes per day showed a smaller improvements.
What also stood out was that the children showed higher math skills without receiving any actual help to do better.
Neural Stimulation
Lead researcher Catherine Davis assumes that behind these results is a combination of biological and environmental factors that act together in stimulating neural adaption and development: “There are some neural growth factors that have been identified in mice that exercise” and that there is “more stimulation when things are moving faster and when you’re moving. So it is cognitively stimulating to move”.
Picture courtesy of Jeff Knezovich.
4 Comments
I remember hearing of other studies like this, is this the first one that was carried out with brain activity being monitored? Don’t remember that having been mentioned before.
Yes, I think it’s the first one that examined what regions got activated in the brain and how that influenced your cognitive abilities.
Only more studies to show where schools should be taking physical education and exercise more seriously. Kids sit around in a chair all day and are swamped with homework. When they get home, they’re either doing homework or slouched over on the bean bag couch playing X-BOX Live. I recall a friend telling me about how in some European countries, you’d pick a sport, and you would spend an hour+ a day at school doing it (could be skiing, tennis, whatever). There should be at least two 20 minute breaks for kids in grade school in-between their classes, where they participate in an outside or gymnasium class to follow a workout with good music; especially for high school students.
Yes; AFAIR here in Germany for example, PE is the class most often cancelled.